The present invention relates to lighting systems, and to systems and techniques that can be employed in the commissioning of lighting systems.
Adoption of light emitting diodes (LED) for lighting has revolutionized indoor industrial lighting, providing multi-dimensional advantages to users. These advantages include lower energy requirements for novel lighting systems than formerly required for conventional lighting systems, better color selection and adaptation, and longer lifetimes of the irradiating luminaires. Additional benefits accruing to lighting systems are derived from the government's allocation of broad swathes of unlicensed and unzoned frequency spectrums. The availability of these broad swathes of frequency spectrums enables the coupling of wireless communications techniques with lighting technology. The coupling of these technologies continues to provide users with ever more useful and valuable synergies in lighting systems.
An important and persistent problem that exists within lighting systems is an awareness of the locations of the various lighting fixtures within a large industrial concern. For example, a multi-level office building can easily contain numerous lighting fixtures on each floor. The arrangement of the locations for the lighting fixtures can very often be different on each floor. It is generally desirable to be able to control these lighting fixtures remotely to accommodate the occupants that may have differing needs and desires within the multi-level office building. As the floor space in office buildings increases, the data regarding placement and connection of the lighting fixtures grows enormously and continues to scale upward as industrial spaces increase.
One particular issue that continues to require innovation is the commissioning of the lighting fixtures. The assignment and reassignment of lighting fixtures to different areas may also involve reassigning the controls associated with those lighting fixtures. The problem is often two-fold: first, installation crews may not be able to generate accurate positional logs for lighting fixture installations because indoor location systems may be error prone; and second, the interior space of a building can be altered through the installation, removal, or moving of interior non load-bearing space separators such as wallboard panels.
Consequently, traditional maintenance of the infrastructure records for lighting is difficult. Proper grouping of the lighting fixtures and their control may require a large manual effort as well as several iterations before meaningful and correct adjustments are made. There is therefore a need for systems and techniques that will efficiently automate the commissioning and control of lighting facilities in large, multi-partitioned spaces.